Tuesday, July 21, 2020

UK

The private firms making a killing from Covid

Under the cover of coronavirus, the Tories have used the real need to stock up on personal protective equipment and other much needed supplies to hand over billions of pounds to private companies. Tomáš Tengely-Evans investigates

The coronavirus crisis - an opportunity for firms to grab more profits from the health service

As hospitals, ambulances and care homes rapidly ran out of personal protective equipment (PPE) back in March, and anger among the public grew, fear swept through Whitehall. Politicians and senior civil servants knew there could be a social explosion if the problem wasn’t solved.

Amid the panic, the Tory government issued around 600 contracts—worth a staggering £5.5 billion—as part of its coronavirus response.

The majority of the contracts were given to businesses already leaching off the public sector, but at least a quarter went to first-time suppliers.

An investment fund from the City of London, a pest control company and a tea, cocoa and spice dealer based out of an east London house are among those joining the outsourcing spree.

One of the firms asked to supply protective kit for health workers was denounced for “putting people’s lives at risk” at its own warehouses. By chance, the firm turned out to be run by a prominent Tory donor.

The NHS—already a favourite target for privatisation—is at the centre of the new wave. One of the biggest chunks of public cash was given to private firms that said they could supply PPE.

The NHS had been hammered by a decade of Tory budget cuts and privatisation. It faced an acute staffing crisis and lack of beds. As the virus hit and staff were without even the basics, workers began falling ill and dying.

For bosses, it was an opportunity. The Tories invoked Article 32 of the Public Contracts Regulations of 2015, allowing them to hand out contracts to specific firms without worrying about making the process transparent by following the normal competitive tendering rules.

The whole outsourcing model is a race to the bottom anyway.

When a contract is published, companies compete to supply goods and services at the lowest possible cost, then drive down workers’ wages, conditions and standards to maximise profits. They often then subcontract operations to other firms with even lower costs in a bid to grab even more money.

Implementing Article 32 meant there were huge opportunities to profit.

As the scandal over PPE shortages grew, the Tories began asking for protective kit from anyone who would promise to supply it.

Around 16,000 potential suppliers contacted a 500-person buying team set up by the Cabinet Office in March to offer to supply kit for hospital staff.

This in itself turned into a £200,000 business opportunity for a call centre supplier, which was tasked with going through a backlog of thousands of offers.

One big winner was Crisp Websites Limited—a pest control company trading under the name Pest Fix Limited. It grabbed a contract worth almost £32 million for isolation suits.

The company doesn’t produce any PPE and does not have any history in health. It has assets worth £18,000 and employs 16 workers based in Littlehampton in West Sussex. Why was it given a contract?

Dynamic

Dan England, PestFix’s co-founder, claimed it won one because it was small enough to be “dynamic”. He boasted that it had “a thriving supply chain with China before the contract”.

But non-profit group the Good Law Project is seeking a judicial review of the PestFix contract. It said that a “big market participant” told it that “no one in the market knew that the contract was up for grabs”.

The Good Law Project is asking why only one firm bid for the contract and where, if anywhere, it was published.

Lawyers want to know why the government didn’t publish the notice stating that it had awarded PestFix the contract within 30 days as required. They want further answers to why the full completed contract was not published.

PestFix isn’t the only company to benefit from the PPE crisis. Another is Double Dragon International, an outfit located on a residential street in Ilford, east London.

The business, which has assets worth £24,0000, usually deals with tea, cocoa and spices. This wasn’t a barrier to it securing a £2 million contract to provide surgical masks and other equipment for the NHS. Initia Ventures Limited got two contracts to supply PPE—one worth over £16 million, another more than £32.5 million. Both were handed over under the Article 32 rule. Initia Ventures, until recently a dormant company, only described itself as providing “business support service activities”.

Another newcomer to PPE supply was Luxe Lifestyle Limited. The company lists two vital items on its website—“novelty gift socks” and a “facial hair removal kit”.

This apparently qualified Luxe Lifestyle to grab a contract worth almost £26 million. The test and trace system is the other area taking the lion’s share of NHS outsourcing money.

Subcontracting giant Serco won the £45.8 million contract to manage the coronavirus test and trace system.

It came only a few months after it was fined £1 million for failings in other contracts. Serco CEO Rupert Soames boasted that it would “cement the position of the private sector” in the NHS supply chain.

In a letter to staff, Soames said, “There are a few, a noisy few, who would like to see us fail because we are private companies delivering a public service.

“I very much doubt that this is going to evolve smoothly, so they will have plenty of opportunity to say I told you so.”

And so it transpired. The entire system of test and trace has been a disaster beset with software problems, data failing to reach public health bodies on time and staff employed to do vital contacting saying they’ve not been able to ring a single person.

No wonder the full scale of the profiteering hasn’t been revealed.

Tussell is a company that produces reports on outsourcing for businesses. Its report from June noted, “Although hundreds of contracts have now been published, there are still gaps in the data.

“Nothing has yet been published relating to the government’s creation of the Nightingale field hospitals, nor about the companies involved in the human contact tracing programme.”

The coronavirus crisis has shown that there is no shortage of “magic money trees”. Rather than the rich and bosses getting their hands on more through outsourcing, we should be taking the money off them to fund services.

And far from privatisation being “efficient”, the PPE scandal show why the only thing it is efficient at is making the rich richer.

PPE supply firm boss delivers cash to Tories

Privatisation of the NHS Supply Chain by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour governments paved the way for the chaos of delivering PPE.

In fact, at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, the problem wasn’t even a lack of gloves, masks or aprons. The problem was getting them to the right places.

The Tory solution was to bring in the army—and an array of private companies, some of which already had the ear of ministers. One of them, Clipper Logistics, is linked to the Tories and has a bad record on coronavirus health and safety.

Its executive chair Steve Parkin is a top donor to the Tories, giving them almost £1 million. He handed the party £25,000 in the run-up to last year’s general election.

Parkin attends the party’s “Leader Group” meals, where he can wine and dine with influential figures.

Meanwhile, Parkin’s workers complained of being “crammed into corridors” and having to wait for “weeks” to get hand sanitiser.

The company usually delivers to high street shops.

One former Clipper Logistics worker described working conditions at the warehouse. “It’s not good,” she explained. “The corridors are tiny, there’s been no hand sanitiser for weeks apart from in the offices.

“We just thought that for everybody’s safety they’d just shut it down because we’re non-essential, but they didn’t.”

When the worker raised concerns over social distancing, a manager replied, “At this time all I care is about getting refunds processed.”

The worker said, “When I voiced my opinions and said I felt unsafe one manager said, ‘Just think of how many people die of cancer every year’.”

Another worker at the warehouse said there was just “no social distancing”. They said, “I live with my mum who’s got an underlying health condition and is at risk. It is really worrying me.

“I do think they’re putting people’s lives at risk. There’s easily 100 to 200 people in the hallway, all having to press the same secu rity buttons, having to clock out with the same finger scanners.”

Outsourcing Britain

Under the Tories, ever more services are being handed over to the private sector

£3.5 trillion worth of tenderssince 2012
£1.8 trillion worth of contracts awarded since 2012
13.6% of Britain’s gross domestic product is the equivalent value of all the contracts

Who is in the money?

Department for Education

Five contracts worth £297 million

The biggest, worth £234 million, went to Edenred (UK Group) Ltd, to provide free school meals when schools are closed.

It allows school to get supermarket vouchers for parents of children who are eligible for free school meals.

The government said the contract was given under the Article 32 rule.

Consulting contracts

30 contracts worth £34 million

These have been given for “consulting services”. The accountancy firm PwC, formerly Pricewater houseCoopers, has snatched the most—seven contracts, worth nearly £10 million.

Department for Transport

17 contracts, worth £33 million

Handed to companies including P&O Ferries and the Eurostar rail operator.

The companies are asked to “reserve freight capacity to ensure the uninterrupted supply of critical goods including food and medical products” in the event of an emergency.

Crown Commercial Service

Three contracts worth £195 million

The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is a Cabinet Office agency that manages outsourcing and procurement across departments.

They include a £2 million contract for Zoom licenses and 11 contracts worth £193 million for ventilators.

These included £136 million for Penlon, £21 million for Cogent Tech and £14.5 million for Plexus Corp.

https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/50363/The+private+firms+making+a+killing+from+Covid

Italy’s earliest coronavirus strains did not arrive from China, study suggests

Strains from Covid-19 patients in the Lombardy region ‘did not contain viral strains isolated in the first months of the outbreak in China’

One possible route to Italy was from Central Europe, where strains with similar mutations were detected, researchers say

Topic | Coronavirus pandemic

Stephen Chen 22 Jul, 2020

The earliest coronavirus strains circulating in Italy did not come directly from China, according to a new study.

Researchers in Milan collected more than 300 blood samples of Covid-19 patients from the Lombardy region between February and April and traced the origin of the viral strains by changes in their genes.

Italy was the first country in the world that put up a travel restriction barring all flights from China, but the genome sequencing suggested “a transmission chain not directly involving China”, said the researchers led by Professor Carlo Federico Perno of Milan University in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on medRxiv.org on Monday.

Lombardy had the earliest known outbreak in the West and has accounted for more than a third of the coronavirus cases in Italy. It is Italy’s richest region with thriving businesses, international transport connections and densely populated urban areas.

Hospital in Italy’s worst-hit region overwhelmed by sharp influx of Covid-19 patients

Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease Covid-19, was isolated and sequenced by Chinese researchers in early January. It was not until February 20 that the first case of local infection was confirmed by Lombardy’s health authorities, but “sustained community transmission was ongoing way before” that date, the researchers said.

Perno’s team collected blood samples from 371 patients in 12 provinces across the region. They were randomly chosen from people admitted to hospital with mild, moderate or severe symptoms. About 7 per cent of the samples failed to produce high-quality reading of the virus’ full genome, but the remainder still provided the largest sample base so far from the Lombardy region.

The strains belonged to two separate lineages, each playing a dominant role in some provinces. But they “did not contain viral strains isolated in the first months of the outbreak in China”, said the paper.

Italy banned travellers from China on January 31, after a Chinese couple tested positive for Covid-19 in Rome. But according to a study by the Italian National Institute of Health last month, the virus had already appeared in sewage water in Milan and Turin in mid-December.

Chinese respiratory disease expert on origins of Covid-19 and Wuhan virus lab conspiracy theories

Perno’s new study showed that there could have been “multiple introductions” of the virus to the Lombardy region. These strains formed relatively isolated clusters in separate areas. One possible direction of the source was Central Europe, where strains with similar mutations had been detected, according to the researchers.

Their calculation suggested that these entries may have happened in the second half of January, based on the assumption that the virus was mutating at a relatively constant speed – although that may not have been the case.

The Italian study is one of several around the world to have found strains that were not traced to China.

In New York, the viral strains circulating in March did not come from China, which researchers said “was unanticipated” because government scientists had gone put extra emphasis on collecting samples in Chinese-speaking neighbourhoods.

First known coronavirus case in France may trace back to December, doctors say

“Rather, the sequence analysis suggests probable introductions of Sars-CoV-2 from Europe, from other US locations and local introductions from within New York,” said the official report of the joint research by the city’s Department of Health and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, released last Friday.
A study by the Pasteur Institute in Paris in May confirmed that the outbreak in France had no direct link to China. Another study
by Russian government scientists identified 67 introductions into their country and found only one that related to a Chinese source.

Some other studies challenged the belief that the pandemic originated in Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late December.

A research team led by Spain’s top biologists identified the virus in a waste water sample in Barcelona dated back to March last year. In the Brazilian beach town Florianopolis, drainage samples collected and stored in government research facilities in November
later tested positive for the coronavirus.

Benjamin Neuman, professor and chair of biological sciences with the Texas A&M University Texarkana, said that the recent findings could be “potentially a really big story” but that the data would require more scrutiny.

Exclusive: Coronavirus outbreak may have started in September, say British scientists

For example, the viral strains detected in sewage samples should have their genome sequenced to determine their position in the evolutionary tree, he said.

“If the sequences are indeed from that early part of the outbreak, it should resemble the earliest sequences from China, possibly with mutations that have not yet been seen,” Professor Neuman said.

They “should not have some of the mutations that appeared later in other parts of the world”, he added.

A government epidemiologist in Beijing, who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to speak to the media, said tracing the origin of the coronavirus by its genes had limitations.

The copies preserved in poor environments such as waste water were probably compromised and unlikely to produce full genome sequences, they said. It would be difficult to estimate a strain’s “age” by mutation because a genetic change appearing later in an international database may not mean it was younger than those sequenced earlier.
“A mutation could be in circulation for some time in a remote corner of the world,” said the researcher. “Can we say that it did not exist until sequencing?”

Source URL: https://scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3094130/italys-earliest-coronavirus-strains-did-not-arrive-china-study
Links

[1] https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus

[2] https://www.scmp.com/topics/italy

[3] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076334/coronavirus-strange-pneumonia-seen-lombardy-november-leading

[4] https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3089850/coronavirus-was-italy-december-waste-water-study-finds

[5] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3087558/new-york-coronavirus-came-europe-not-directly-china-scientists

[6] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3094105/coronavirus-dominant-strain-russia-came-europe-after-chinese

[7] https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3091757/earlier-signs-coronavirus-sewage-samples-brazil

[8] https://research.scmp.com/discount/CIRSAVE30AL?redirect=%2Fproducts%2Fchina-internet-report-2020-pro&module=blurb&pgtype=article

Is the COVID-19 pandemic cure really worse than the disease? Here’s what our research found

July 7, 2020 8.14am EDT Updated July 9, 2020 5.27pm EDT

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

The coronavirus pandemic catapulted the country into one of the deepest recessions in U.S. history, leaving millions of Americans without jobs or health insurance. There is a lot of evidence that economic hardship is associated with poor health and can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, cognitive dysfunction and early death.

All of that raises a question: Is the U.S. better off with the public health interventions being used to keep the coronavirus from spreading or without them?

In a new working paper, I and a team of health economists from U.S. universities set out to answer that question from a humanitarian perspective. To do that, we reviewed the latest data and scientific research about the virus to evaluate the number of lives saved if public health measures remain in place. We also reviewed economic studies looking at deaths caused by past restrictions of economic activity to assess the number of lives that could be lost if those measures trigger an extended economic recession.

We estimate that by the end of 2020, public health measures to mitigate COVID-19, including shelter-in-place orders, school and business closures, social distancing and face mask recommendations, would save between 900,000 and 2.7 million lives in the U.S. The economic downturn and loss of income from shelter-in-place measures and other restrictions on economic activity could contribute to between 50,400 and 323,000 deaths, based on an economic decline of 8%-14%.

Counting lives alone, we conclude that the public health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 are justified and in the best interest of our society.
Why it matters

President Donald Trump likes to say that the cure must not be worse than the disease when it comes to coronavirus interventions that affect the economy. The public health approach works, but it can also hurt. Determining the “right dose” of a medicine always requires careful consideration of unintended consequences.

Several cost-benefit calculations of the COVID-19 economic shutdown measures have recently appeared in the popular press. They determined that saving the life of a COVID-19 patient could come at a price of up to US$6.7 million per year of life saved in terms of economic losses. These calculations stirred up a heated debate, with one side advocating for a save-lives-not-dollars approach and the other doubting its wisdom. The debate fell along party lines, further contributing to misinformation and even some willful resistance to public health recommendations.

By acknowledging and fully exploring the possible ramifications of the economic recession in lives saved or lost, our hope is that we will create a more “apples-to-apples” comparison. Most comparisons of the costs of interventions being discussed put a dollar figure on lives saved or lost. If an analysis finds, for example, that the U.S. pays $1.5 million for every life saved, that raises a value question: Is that a reasonable cost or not? The answer can lead people and policymakers to resist public health measures. Our analysis instead compares the number of lives likely to be saved to the number of lives likely to be lost, keeping judgments about the value of a human life out of the equation.

The results are clear – the public health measures save more lives than they may jeopardize in the long run.
What still isn’t known

The current economic downturn is unusual in that it wasn’t caused by a structural economic problem, like a war or a housing bubble, but rather by a pandemic – a severe but temporary external factor. Therefore, it is unclear how long it will take for the economy to recover. It is also unclear how the pandemic may change over time.

The June and July jobs reports showed higher-than-expected jobs growth following the easing of economic restrictions. This seeded much-needed optimism for a quick economic recovery and suggested that the impact on the economy might be not as severe as people expected. At the same time, a recent study shows that many COVID-19 survivors may lose immunity to the virus within a matter of months, adding to reinfection concerns, which means public health measures may actually be saving more lives than once thought. Many of these uncertainties can impact our calculations.

Our team is continuously tracking these developments and updating our analyses.
What other research is being done

An important question that we have not explored yet is how the benefits and the costs of COVID-19 measures are distributed. We know the virus disproportionately affects older people and people of color. We also know that lower-income people are most likely to suffer health consequences from loss of employment or income.

If policymakers have the information to better understand these effects, they can find ways to anticipate public sentiment during public health crises.

This article has been updated to reflect new calculations for the minimum number of lives saved. The change is described in an update to the working paper.

Author

Olga Yakusheva

Associate Professor in Nursing and Public Health, University of Michigan
Disclosure statement

Olga Yakusheva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Scientists unveil largest 3D map of the universe ever

The map includes more than 2 million galaxies and covers 11 billion years of the universe's history.

This map shows 11 billion years of the universe's history, with galaxies closest to Earth appearing in purple and blue, and distant galaxies in yellow and red.
(Image: © EPFL)

By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer

After five years of peering into the deepest reaches of space, researchers have released what they call the "largest three-dimensional map of the universe" ever. No, you cannot see your house.

The mind-boggling map is the result of an ongoing project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) — an ambitious, international quest to map the expansion of the observable universe, and hopefully solve a few cosmic conundrums in the process. With this newest update, the project has mapped and measured more than 2 million galaxies, stretching from our Milky Way to ancient objects more than 11 billion light-years away.

Related: 11 fascinating facts about our Milky Way

The detailed new map will help astronomers piece together a murky period of the universe's expansion known as "the gap."

"We know both the ancient history of the universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there's a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years," Kyle Dawson, a cosmologist at the University of Utah and lead researcher of the project, said in a statement. "For five years, we have worked to fill in that gap."

The gap begins a few billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists are able to measure the rate of the universe's expansion before this thanks to the cosmic microwave background — ancient radiation left over from the infancy of the universe that researchers can still detect; and they can calculate recent expansion by measuring how the distance between Earth and nearby galaxies increases over time. But expansion in the middle period has been little studied because the light of galaxies more than a few hundred million light-years away can be incredibly faint. To fill in the gap, a team of more than 100 scientists from around the world looked at not just distant galaxies, but also bright-burning quasars (extremely luminous objects powered by the hungriest black holes in the cosmos).

Key to this survey is a phenomenon called redshift — a process by which light from the most ancient, distant galaxies is literally stretched by the expansion of the universe, increasing its wavelength and shifting it toward the redder end of the spectrum. As a result of this cosmic color-change, distant light sources appear redder, while those nearer to Earth look bluer (you can see this phenomenon illustrated in the team's maps above).

To calculate the rate of cosmic expansion 11 billion years ago, the team measured the redshift of millions of distant objects along with their velocities — a measurement that shows how much a galaxy is being tugged by the gravity of other matter around it. The team's results, which are described in 23 new studies released on July 20, show that the universe began expanding at an increased rate about 6 billion years ago, following a period of deceleration.

Scientists attribute the universe's expansion to a mysterious force called dark energy, though no one is entirely sure what it is or where it exists. Surveys like this one help scientists better constrain the properties of dark energy, the researchers said, though it remains far from understood. The solution to that conundrum will have to wait for another day … hopefully one not too many billions of years away.

Originally published on Live Science.

Edited by James C. Zachos, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, and approved June 1, 2020 (received for review February 18, 2020)

Significance

The SADA is an annually-resolved hydroclimate atlas in South America that spans the continent south of 12°S from 1400 to 2000 CE. Based on 286 tree ring records and instrumentally-based estimates of soil moisture, the SADA complements six drought atlases worldwide filling a geographical gap in the Southern Hemisphere. Independently validated with historical records, SADA shows that the frequency of widespread severe droughts and extreme pluvials since the 1960s is unprecedented. Major hydroclimate events expressed in the SADA are associated with strong El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Southern Annular Mode (SAM) anomalies. Coupled ENSO-SAM anomalies together with subtropical low-level jet intensification due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions may cause more extreme droughts and pluvials in South America during the 21st century.

Abstract

South American (SA) societies are highly vulnerable to droughts and pluvials, but lack of long-term climate observations severely limits our understanding of the global processes driving climatic variability in the region. The number and quality of SA climate-sensitive tree ring chronologies have significantly increased in recent decades, now providing a robust network of 286 records for characterizing hydroclimate variability since 1400 CE. We combine this network with a self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) dataset to derive the South American Drought Atlas (SADA) over the continent south of 12°S. The gridded annual reconstruction of austral summer scPDSI is the most spatially complete estimate of SA hydroclimate to date, and well matches past historical dry/wet events. Relating the SADA to the Australia–New Zealand Drought Atlas, sea surface temperatures and atmospheric pressure fields, we determine that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) are strongly associated with spatially extended droughts and pluvials over the SADA domain during the past several centuries. SADA also exhibits more extended severe droughts and extreme pluvials since the mid-20th century. Extensive droughts are consistent with the observed 20th-century trend toward positive SAM anomalies concomitant with the weakening of midlatitude Westerlies, while low-level moisture transport intensified by global warming has favored extreme rainfall across the subtropics. The SADA thus provides a long-term context for observed hydroclimatic changes and for 21st-century Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections that suggest SA will experience more frequent/severe droughts and rainfall events as a consequence of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Teachers at risk from USA's DIY approach to reopenings

Experts need to guide school reopenings but, at present, across the US teachers and school officials are being left to make decisions themselves

Josh Benjamin

20th July 2020 16:00

Both of us are affected by complex problems with potentially serious consequences for our lives, but we possess little of the knowledge required to form valid opinions on the subject.

That is not to say, however, that the polar bear and I are without expertise.

If you want to teach a first-grader to read, ask me. If you want to pull an animal out of the Arctic Ocean and devour it raw, the polar bear is your creature.

But outside of our respective wheelhouses, you’ll need to find epidemiologists or atmospheric scientists who spend their careers studying pandemics and climate change for useful, insightful advice.

A DIY approach

Yet, as I write this in the middle of July, it appears – in the US at least – that educators are the ones being left to make the decisions on how they will reopen schools in September.

Los Angeles and San Diego both appear to be planning for remote learning through the fall.

New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu are all implementing a hybrid model, with students splitting their week between in-school and remote learning.

No doubt others are hoping to reopen as normal without incident.

In short, confronted with the same virus and no vaccine, school districts across the country are taking different approaches that we can only assume will have different public health impacts on the communities they serve.

For teachers, this is a tough place to be – without expert-driven recommendations at the national level – and there are two key fears.

A failure of leadership

The first is my own government.

The world has long known that the Trump administration has an abusive relationship with science. Recently, our president tweeted that schools should reopen.

He may well be correct, but that would be the product of coincidence and not a scientific method.

It takes fairly earnest credulity to believe that someone with deep expertise on viruses, pandemics or children had any role in crafting that recommendation.

With a failure of leadership at the top of the federal government, reopening decisions devolve to individual states, whose governments further devolve decision-making to local municipalities.

Deferred responsibility

Oklahoma recently released a framework for reopening schools called Return to Learn.

In the introduction to that document, the state superintendent of public instruction essentially asks local school districts to make their own epidemiologically sound decisions for their students:

“It is not necessary to act on every consideration in this comprehensive framework. Rather, in keeping with the guidance we have received from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Oklahoma health officials, districts should take a layered approach to Covid-19 mitigation, adopting those policies and practices that are feasible, practical and acceptable within their school community.”

When our national and state governments disempower themselves, decision-making falls to the local level, with every recommendation merely an option that can be accepted or rejected by a school community with no experts in sight.

A lack of knowledge

My second fear, as I think about returning to school, is my own colleagues.

In the vacuum created by an absence of leadership, teachers and administrators, as well as parents and students, are participating in the process for determining when and how to reopen schools.

In Columbus, Ohio, a task force of school district staff members helped to craft reopening recommendations. Parents and students were also surveyed on how they would prefer to attend school in the fall.

On its face, that might seem reasonable: democratise the process by involving as many stakeholders as possible in this immeasurably impactful decision.

But it's an idea with clear shortcomings.

I have never been to Columbus, but I will assume that few, if any, of the educators and administrators there are epidemiologists, which means they lack the background needed to make valid recommendations on what is, at its core, a public health issue.

When the wrong people try to do the right things, it can be pretty scary.

Why we need answers

It’s understandable there is this desire to find a solution, though, as being back in school would clearly be best for everyone – if it can be done safely.

It's clear online learning can only get us so far: In a recent remote lesson, I showed the students a picture of a square as part of a unit on geometry. “What shape is this?” I asked.

One responded, “It’s a trapezoid!” Surprised, I asked if she could see what I was showing her. “Nope,” she confirmed enthusiastically. Her internet connection was too slow to stream video.

As a teacher, I know that remote learning is a grotesque approximation of real school and desperately want to turn the lights back on in my classroom.

But as a non-epidemiologist, I am like a polar bear discussing carbon emissions.

I have no informed opinion to contribute on whether returning to school this fall is a good idea: I just wish someone would tell me.

The DIY approach helps no one.

Josh Benjamin teaches first grade (Year 2) in Boston, Massachusetts

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment